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On the morning of the village party two girls in torn dresses scramble uphill heaving two dusty jerrycans full of a milky-grey liquid.

"It's water," explains eight-year-old Dorothy Nabatanzi, contemplating the brown rim of sludge around the mouth of her can.

Twice a day since she was small, Dorothy has left her thatched homestead in the village of Kisaaka, central Uganda, and set off down the hill to a forest clearing. There she has filled three 10-litre cans with water for her parents and eight brothers and sisters to wash in, cook with and drink. It was a simple task as there was only one water source within a mile - shared by 500 people and their cattle, pigs and goats.

First, Dorothy would step carefully on to a log bridging the stagnant green pool. Then she would force a space between the thick algae, floating animal and human excrement, and hovering flies, and plunge her plastic cans into the cloudy water. If she dragged her hand through the water, it would emerge webbed with slime. If she looked hard at the pond's surface, she would see bubbles emerging from the mass of parasites breeding beneath. When her six- or seven-year-old friends felt thirsty, they would cup their hands and drink straight from the pond, straining the water through their dirty T-shirts so as not to swallow the lumps of weed.

Sometimes the children would see cattle led into the centre of the pool to lap up the water, defecating into it as they went. Nevertheless, it was the only place in the village to drink.

"I know it is contaminated," shrugs Dorothy. "They told us at school it was unsafe and my mother likes to boil it first."

But this can of murky water is the last Dorothy will draw. She will use it to wash for the grand celebration: the opening of the village's new well.

Politicians, counsellors and dignitaries were already climbing out of four-wheel drives and making their way down the slope to a makeshift stage next to the stagnant pool. There they sip bottled Coke and lead the chanting: "Clean water for everyone, everywhere!" The community primary school has rehearsed two songs about water and secondary pupils perform a play in which the lead characters noisily re-enact the village curse - diarrhoea - to loud applause.

Kisaaka shares an irony with most of central Uganda. There is a vast supply of water in the country's massive lakes and rivers, replenished during two rainy seasons, yet the people have no clean water to drink. Across the country more than 40% of the population are forced to sip from rancid, infected sources or die of thirst. The government admits that water must be its priority, but resources for well building are limited. In Mpigi district, which includes Kisaaka, only around a third of people have access to safe water - yet clear, clean water gushes through the rock beneath the soil.

Kisaaka's new hand-dug 16ft well, which sits a few metres from the old smelly source, took two weeks to build and cost around £830. It seems absurdly simple. But Kisaaka's community of subsistence farmers, who have no electricity and live on one meal a day, see it as a miracle. A local non-govern ment organisation, Kyakulumbye Development Foundation, in partnership with the British NGO WaterAid, trained and paid village masons £300 to dig, line and seal the well. They taught them to change the plastic pipes every three months, fence the site and watch for excited children who could break the pump by playing on it.

"We had heard of other new wells that broke down and were left, so communities had to go back to their old source," says Salongo Yosia Bafamimwa, the newly appointed pump mechanic. He has 14 children, including three sets of twins, who spent most of their childhood doubled up with stomach cramps and diarrhoea.

"Drinking from the stagnant source was killing the village," says one local health visitor. Kisaaka has endured a cholera epidemic, persistent intestinal worms, skin disease, hacking coughs, constant debilitating diarrhoea and dysentery and, most prolific of all, malaria, from ingesting the larvae of mosquitoes that breed in the stagnant pool. Corlder Kasozi, a doctor who runs the local health centre, says he saw 20 to 30 cases of malaria a day, with rare cases admitted in comas. Some villagers were becoming resistant to malarial drugs. "A clean water source is the only solution," he says.

Sophia Lubega Nalongo, 48, a widow with eight children, is stirring a vat of food for the feast over a charcoal fire. Her 17-year-old son Kiirza cannot join the celebration as he is lying in a malarial fever. "I tried as a rule to boil this water but the children would drink it straight from the pond when they went to collect it," she says. "It's unbelievable to have clean water in our midst, which the children can drink from the pump. The old water stank.

"When I heated it, a thick foam came to the surface, like the lather on a soap - which is how we knew it was contaminated with faeces. I can't afford drugs for the children when they get malaria, so I treat them with herbs first and if it doesn't work, I try to save the money [around 15p] for 10 Panadol painkillers."

Betty Naiga, 45, another widow, will join the village's new water committee to oversee the maintenance of the well and collect a small revenue from families for its upkeep. Her four-year-old daughter Resty sits with her, subdued and in pain after constant parasitic infection. "Almost 10 times a month the children's illnesses would become so debilitating I had to take them to the health centre, sometimes walking them [up to two miles]. Water is essential in the household, everything you do is centred around it and without clean water, we would not survive here," she says.

Steven Semambo, a primary school teacher and choirmaster, says: "At least now the children will be well enough to attend lessons. At least 20 children were off sick each week because of water. Those that attended would run down to drink straight from the stagnant pool when they were thirsty."

The next question is sanitation - building latrines for those who have none at home and are forced to defecate in the open. NGO workers have been teaching hand-washing to children and families who cannot afford soap.

Away from the celebration, in her mud-built homestead, 85-year-old Kasalina Nsekambabaye is proof that if you survived the water, you could live to a grand old age. She shuffles to her door to say: "The clean water has made me very happy. God bless everyone who brought it to us."

In the shade stands Kasalina's five grandchildren, orphaned by Uganda's Aids epidemic. Beside them is a pink plastic tub with the last of the fetid water from the old source evaporating in the sun. "Now we can look forward to good health," Kasalina says.